Friday, October 12, 2007

What's Different About Idaho

I’ve been asked a few times by Californians how the
people of Idaho are different than them. I’ve found
two major differences.

First, Idaho natives don’t have the same skills at walking
in groups of other people. In the grocery store for example,
people don’t know how to walk without being in someone
else’s way. I think this is because Idaho has a small
population and thus people here don’t have the experience
of getting through moderate crowds from a young age. (I
couldn't find a photo of people bumping into each other
but the image below sums up Idahoan's body space issues
pretty well)

Based on the Standard Model of the interactions of
fundamental particles, Collision II shows a time-lapse
view of two particles colliding.

Second, Idaho natives don’t care about fresh food. I thought
about this for the 238th time today after eating a piece of
very stale banana nut bread purchased from Bucer’s Coffeehouse.
It isn’t just Bucer’s. I’ve gotten stale food at almost every
coffee shop and grocery store in Moscow. Once I got a sandwich
for lunch at Wheatberries. One girl grabbed a bag containing 1/4
of a loaf of bread, frowned at it, then smelled it. She called
a co-worker over and had her smell the bread too. They still
weren’t sure about the bread so they called over a third
co-worker to help their investigation. At this point I jumped
up and told them I’d changed my mind about what type of bread
I wanted on my sandwich. When I did get my sandwich the lettuce
was wilted and turning brown and the bag of stale tasting potato
chips was actually 5 weeks past its “use by” date.

Grocery stores here are just as bad but this post is making me
nauseous AND homesick so I think I’ll stop now that you know
how Idahoans are different than Californians.